Passive Aggression

• Laya Nina Perez, Grade 9
• Poetry
• 2014

I am passive aggression.
I am a leash and the ravenous animal.
I am the dormant volcano.
I am the clenching of your fists.
I am the screams locked behind pursed lips.
I am wrath shoved into a box, wrapped in several layers of neatly disguised gift wrap, thrown into the darkest part of your sea chained to an anchor.
I am the pent up frustration bubbling within your chest.
I am the frantic cooling that stamps down on every dark thought and builds a mountain of ash in the process that suffocates your very insides with worry and anxiety.
I am every hateful thought shoved into a thick glass bottle filled to the brim that cracks and spills every so often.
I am a rubber-band ball of nerves struggling to keep every individual band from snapping.
I am anger, fear and self-control pulled into a messy, awkward lump of emotion.
I am part fear because you are well aware of the fact, that when one band snaps, when one crack seeps a drop, when you lose grip on the leash, everything is released everywhere in a flurry of morbid chaos.
The mountain of ash crumbles into itself and emerges the volcano you tried so hard to tame. Every shout is released, every lock broken, every knuckle pale white, every fingernail digging further into skin like the box cutter into your sea to find the prettily wrapped box only to tear apart the paper and spill the contents.
I am broken, I am a facade.
I am too often mistaken for ignorance and blatancy. I am a silent anger, I do not express myself.
Yet I am far more formidable than any other forms, my anger festers and strengthens with each passing day. The reason for my formidability is that the cage I house it in grows more resilient along with it. Be it one factor or another, my heart is a fire pit that smelts every bit of rage into a cold, metal lump shackled to all my reckless thoughts.
My one fault however, is that I did not make a key to unlock me from my shackles. I cannot vent to anyone without fear of directly hurting or disgusting them. My rage is a one-person meal; I haven't enough reason to ever share it.
I am pitiful and deceitful.
I am bright colours hastily painted over a shell of destruction.
I am a land mine, buried under a rose.
I am a rose that blooms brighter in order to hide its thorns.
I am a thorn, I am a thorn in your side.
Causing you pain you every day. Telling you that you are not good enough. That your flaws outweigh your qualities.
I tell you that you are self-destructive. I tell you to fear yourself with every cell in your miserable excuse of a body.
I tell you to smile, I tell you to laugh. With a knife to your throat, with the box cutter to your present, a match to the gas, your bottle five storeys from the ground, scissors to your rubber-band ball, the animal to your shaking body.
I am passive aggression.
And I am threatening to devour you.